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Privacy focused platform Skiff is joining Notion, Skiff to be sunset
- ankushnarula 3y agoit hurts to ride the coattails of opaque achievers
- valery-eppie 3y agoWhat happened to Skiff can happen to any service as long as it has servers. That’s the nature of centralized technology. In a decentralized providerless ecosystem you can buy a company but you cannot buy the ecosystem. So decisions like this can never affect the end user. Decentralized network belongs to users, along with their privacy.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- willardsherrie 3y ago[dead]
- mirshko 3y agohttps://skiff.com/data-migration https://skiff.com/data-migration I’m really upset about this, I was about to go all in on Skiff after being burnt by ProtonMail. Glad I didn’t. Feel really bad for those who did.
- jehanrizla 3y agoI would check out Mailfence. Best alternative to PM IMO. https://blog.mailfence.com/how-to-migrate-your-skiff-account/ https://blog.mailfence.com/how-to-migrate-your-skiff-account...
- cdurth 3y agoI literally just migrated from Proton yesterday. Oh well, Tuta now i guess...
- AndyKluger 3y agoFYI I didn't log into my tuta account for a while and they deleted it completely. No way I can recover the data and personal connections I made using it. Also Discord was like "yeah you may have your Discord credentials, but we need you to check your email before you can log in again anyway." So I lost my Discord account, too. But I started using this new thing called Skiff and . . . Oh.
- worez 3y agohad the same thing happen to me. never going back to tuta.
- Nathanba 3y agoMe too and I used my tuta email address as my email for bitwarden. If I had forgotten my password then good night. Back when I created an account they didnt have a popup telling you about 6 month deletions, my email was just gone some day.
- cdurth 3y agoTheir policy states that free accounts will be deleted if not active for 6 months.
- gia_ferrari 3y agoWas it an aspect of Proton that made you switch? Seeing it get mentioned negatively all over this comment section is making me a little concerned.
- cdurth 3y agoeh not really, for me it was the fact it took forever to implement some of the features. I also don't use the address much or any of their other features so was looking for a cheaper solution.
- gia_ferrari 3y agoSorry, what's the news on Proton?
- jayveeone 3y agoFour people mentioned proton in this thread without any indication of what happened lol
- FabHK 3y agoProton accidentally all the emails. [sorry]
- gia_ferrari 3y agoAre you suggesting they had a data loss? Or is this a quip?
- _Parfait_ 3y ago...hilarious dude.
- throwuxiytayq 3y agoProton is perfectly fine and as secure as email gets. I would think there is some sort of a FUD campaign going on against them, if I didn’t believe that people are dumb enough to endlessly spout bullshit on topics they know nothing about without external motivation.
- gia_ferrari 3y agoI've noticed that here as well, specifically with Proton. Some sort of cultural quirk I suppose. I'll keep using their service, until I see some more tangible criticism on their security. I've had positive experiences overall. Yes the extra security makes some things harder, like searching. That is a fair tradeoff for me. Only real complaint I have is that Proton Drive is web-only. No supported API, either. We desperately need a Linux CLI and/or sync tool. Edit: I meant a Linux tool. There are windows/mac/ios/android apps. Updated my post.
- hafidzwibowo 3y agoyeah man, me too. thoroughly disappointed
- teraflop 3y ago> We’re extremely excited to accelerate our mission by joining forces with Notion’s world-class team. We sincerely hope that the Skiff community will join us for this next stage of our journey. Yet another entry for https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
- hellorashid 3y agoyeah but im glad they atleast let you export as markdown instead of just notion, at least i can use obsidian now
- Midnight1938 3y agoWhere did you go then?
- Scottn1 3y agoI too was THIS close to going all-in on Skiff last week, leaving Outlook.com for more privacy, but contact sync with phone was a major annoyance. Thankfully in hindsight.
- BobFromEnzyte 3y agoI will be switching over to Tuta. Their new subscriptions let you setup unlimited aliases if you are using a custom domain. So, I'll be able to keep all my same email addresses and still have strong encryption.
- RyeCombinator 3y agoToo bad, really enjoyed using skiff.
- monicaincog 3y agotry https://snote.app https://snote.app it's privacy focused collaboration
- dantondwa 3y agoThey’re just closing it, wow. Someone had recommended me Skiff, but I stayed away from it and opted for Proton, given that they have been around for a while and Skiff smelled like VC money too much. I guess it was the right choice. At this point, a criteria I try to follow when I have to choose whether or not to rely on a tool is: is it funded by VC? If so, steer clear.
- Brajeshwar 3y agoMay I suggest something to think over, what about -- “Can I walk out of this, and migrate elsewhere and how complex/hard will be that migration?” instead of the blanket VC-Funded or not. My thoughts.
- Gentil 3y agoNot OP. But why should I? It's a hassle to do migration. So if there is a non-vc funded choice, why would I bother with all the trouble?
- hobs 3y agoBecause in a couple of years regardless if you are locked in its going to end, change, or otherwise break.
- johnkizer 3y agoThat's fair, although IMO it's additionally fair to be skeptical of making a long-term commitment to products/services that aren't funded in ways that permit long-term product planning and reasonably-paced development based on that plan.
- ehnto 3y agoI guess we all make our own risk calculations, but if it is truly long term, 5+ years then a SaaS is a risk regardless of funding. Especially for my personal life where long term really means long term, self-hosted is the only safe option. As an employee it's a toss up on whether your employer or your SaaS dependency changes course first. So a shorter term engagement is basically guaranteed and it doesn't matter that much.
- ZydgQPiAtglF7N 3y agoAh stink. Time to move then. Can anyone recommend a privacy focused email provider that can run free or cheap custom domains?
- unstatusthequo 3y agoProtonmail
- bcye 3y agoMigadu (you pay for volume, not per inbox/domain)
- hellorashid 3y agotuta dot com is free for personal, pretty good
- forwardemail 3y ago[flagged]
- saintfire 3y agoI had not heard of this and at a glance it seems pretty fantastic.
- RileyJames 3y agoThat’s awesome. I didn’t realise you did email hosting, maybe that’s new? I’ve been using their email forwarding (paid) for a few years now. Great for side projects and any random domain I register. I immediately catch all to a domain@myprimarydomain.com so I have all my email in one place. Most of its bullshit and spam, but the few interesting reach outs are usually worth it.
- forwardemail 3y agoYes, we released it recently last year. We fully support SMTP/IMAP/POP3, and are testing and improving our CalDAV implementation (calendar).
- hellohihello135 3y agoJust a reminder that notion is not end to end encrypted. Any one at notion can read your notes.
- rvz 3y ago> "As we begin to shift focus to our shared efforts with Notion, we will be closing down Skiff's product suite after a 6-month sunset period" I had high hopes for Skiff, but once again it became yet another incredible journey and an entire VC grift racing to an acquisition only for it to be shut down just like the majority of VC fuelled startups who probably ran out of money. The end users are always left holding the bag and continue to lose in the process of anything VC funded these days.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tripdout 3y agoFirst time hearing about Skiff, but it looks really cool. Too bad the privacy part isn't going to work once it gets integrated into Notion.
- pickledish 3y agoMan. In addition to Skiff users, I feel really bad for the people working there, too. Imagine spending years of your life on one product, working hard every day to make it as good as it can be... all for it just to go “poof” one day so some executives and investors can get rich. Might have been the plan all along, even. Sad
- graton 3y agoYou get used to it if you work long enough in the industry. I've had multiple products go poof over the years. Best to try not to let it affect you emotionally. Part of maintaining a healthy work/life balance to be able to keep things separated.
- gia_ferrari 3y agoTrue. It still hurts though. I _want_ to care. I do my best work, with least effort, when I'm solving a real problem with people I care about. I enjoy thinking back about stuff I made, knowing it's out there doing its job. I can separate out my work (which, lest we forget, is the majority of my waking hours, because of the reality of working a full time job) but that's not particularly good for my mental health either. It's part of the reason I am looking to branch out my career into a different, perhaps more durable sphere. All I'm saying is, if it's affecting you, changing aspects about your career is valid. Just getting used to it doesn't work for me, despite it being fine for others.
- LightHugger 3y agoacquisition and merger culture is so incredibly destructive. It doesnt have to be this way either, with much stricter regulations. It's an enormous waste of resources and that's the point half the time, just buy companies to delete their services.
- marcinzm 3y agoGovernments "optimizing" resource allocation to avoid "waste" tends to not actually make people's lives better. Or reduce actual waste.
- hellorashid 3y agocongrats to the team! a little sad at the shutdown however, one of the few privacy focused products with good design and attention to detail
- hellorashid 3y agomakes me wonder if "users don't care about privacy" is more true than i thought
- gia_ferrari 3y agoCould also be that privacy-conscious users are not easy to make money from with a free service. Ten gigs of email is a lot of email. I wonder what the percentage of paying users was.
- hellorashid 3y agoyeah that's fair - i was one of the free ones lol
- forwardemail 3y ago[flagged]
- ylere 3y agoBeen using them on the paid plan for a 1yr+ and apart from working great and reliably I've been really appreciating how no-nonse and to the point their communication has been. Never realized it's also OSS, thank you for pointing that out! Really easy to set up too, just make sure to also set up DKIM/SPF/DMARC to make sure the forwarded emails don't go to spam.
- forwardemail 3y ago[dead]
- mysteria 3y agoThis is why it's very important to have your email under a domain you own, rather than the email hoster's domain. That way your addresses remain portable and you can seamlessly switch providers if they go under.
- IamLoading 3y agohttps://skiff-org.github.io/whitepaper/Skiff_Whitepaper_2023.pdf https://skiff-org.github.io/whitepaper/Skiff_Whitepaper_2023... https://github.com/skiff-org/skiff-apps https://github.com/skiff-org/skiff-apps Skiff whitepaper and project. Looks interesting
- withinrafael 3y agoWish the team well, scrambling to get my mail out of the service now. Heads up to folks trying to bring their mail to Proton: the ProtonMail Import-Export tool can't seem to bring in any mail from the Skiff MBOX export. Glancing at the file, it appears to be an original MBOX format export, that is "From " with no quoting, etc. That's rough.
- protonmail 3y agoHere is a migration guide: https://proton.me/blog/migrate-skiff-to-proton https://proton.me/blog/migrate-skiff-to-proton
- cc2562 3y agoAnd...this is why E2E encryption isn't enough to protect your data. E2E encryption + self-hosting + user-controlled keys is the way. For docs & stuff switched to Anytype a while ago, I think there are others that at least offer encryption + self-hosting: Affine, Joplin, Obsidian.
- methou 3y agoAnd trillium.
- echelon 3y agoWhy do companies try to compete in this space? The margins are thin and the giants have vast offerings. The only thing I see winning against Google and Microsoft is some hybrid, open source local + cloud suite of tools. Something better than Thunderbird, more like Obsidian. A combination of native and cloud, working well across all platforms, integrated with a full suite of other productivity/office tools, but most importantly open source. Because I don't want to trust my data to some other tool that will just dry up and disappear. That's a steep gradient to climb. Really steep.
- cc2562 3y agoYep...E2E encryption just doesn't cut it when the company still owns your data & accounts on their servers. I've adopted Anytype; encryption + self-hosting + open-source backend is rock solid.
- manyty 3y agoHere's a Notion vs Anytype comparison from the company's blog https://blog.anytype.io/notion-alternative/ https://blog.anytype.io/notion-alternative/
- miramba 3y agoAdvertises local-first on top of their page. Immediate account creation requirement on iOS, not even a demo mode.
- ezst 3y agoI'll check again Anytype in maybe a year or so, because currently their whole "typing" thing just isn't up to snuff (I wrote about it here before so you can check my comments history of you are curious and find a lengthy post about it and why I think only Trilium notes is sound -as in enforcing type consistency- in this space).
- loosescrews 3y agoI think Dropbox and Slack/Salesforce might have a chance. I'd argue that Dropbox might need to enter the space in order to be competitive long term. Slack is already competing with email and Salesforce already owns an online office suite. I think the only path small players have is as an acquisition.
- ssss11 3y agoPeople don’t entrust these kinds of services lightly. A 6 month notice to get off sucks.
- binary132 3y agoPeople need to start thinking about how every webservice exists for only as long as its operator continues to pay for its hosting and operation.
- dcow 3y agoWhy would Notion shut down the email provider product? I understand sunsetting drive and rolling pages and calendar into Notion and Cron, respectively. But it would be pretty awesome if Notion had an email service. There’s nothing out there that’s as easy as Google Workspace (not even Proton’s suite—I use it personally) and I’d use Notion-plus-Skiff-and-Cron over Google Workspace any day. Huge miss…
- zer00eyz 3y agoRunning mail is hard. Running mail is hard. Running mail is hard. Candidly, the ability to profit off of email as a service is probably not a challenge that many businesses are up to. Deliverability is a massive pain in the ass. Unless you have the team and are well established, starting up or re-badging a mail service would be a nightmare. Good email is expensive for a (bad) reason.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoThis really appears to be lost on HN and I have no idea why. It’s such a weird blindspot. I only see it said it displayed as extreme cynicism toward Google and Microsoft by people trying to run their own personal mail server, who after some polite prodding almost never seem to be doing bare minimum ‘best practices’ for getting their mail delivered.
- pembrook 3y agoVery few people understand the extent of how many bad actors there are until they experience it firsthand. That said, Google and Microsoft essentially have monopolies in their respective areas of the market (Gmail in consumer, Outlook in B2B), and if you think they aren't slowly letting these products decline while cranking up the revenue extraction...you're dead wrong. With LLMs they could eliminate spam in a much more reliable way without killing off small senders, tomorrow. Yet, they will never devote any real resources to these products, since they don't have to. Nobody wants to go through the hassle of changing their email. Outlook still uses the Microsoft Word HTML rendering engine, completely unchanged, from 20 years ago. That's all you need to know about the incentives for innovation after you've successfully captured a network.
- dcow 3y agoWhy would Notion shut down the email provider product? I understand sunsetting drive and rolling pages and calendar into Notion and Cron, respectively. But it would be pretty awesome if Notion had an email service. There’s nothing out there that’s as easy as Google Workspace and I’d use Notion plus email and calendar over google workspace any day. Huge miss…
- LoganDark 3y agoso Skiff's been paid by Notion to shut down. Does Notion offer their own competing email service?
- tamimio 3y agoWow, I have accounts there as early as when they started and last year was almost going to pull the trigger and migrate there, glad I never did, which is a reminder for everyone to use your own domain so all your email/s are valid even if you change the service.
- chrisandchris 3y ago> With the Notion acquisition, what happens to my Skiff accounts? And then 5 paragraphs with corporate blabber, a 6th with the important instructions (or a link to it; telling you it's not that bad to loose your account) and a 7nd with corporate blabber. They really got bought from corporate.
- neximo64 3y agoSo Notion's strategy is clear now. They're going for Microsoft and Google and the collaboration suite.
- pb7 3y agoThat's great. Their execution has been excellent. Excited to see what they come up with.
- forwardemail 3y ago[flagged]
- forwardemail 3y ago[flagged]
- mvdtnz 3y agoTell us about it. I'm not here to do homework.
- I_am_tiberius 3y agoDoes that mean Notion will get e2e encrypted soon? It's about time.
- forwardemail 3y ago[flagged]
- forwardemail 3y ago[flagged]
- pndy 3y agoThey should put a message on login site and a banner inside inbox because from just glancing over "We are excited to share that Skiff is joining Notion." placed over barely readable gray text on white background user could assume nothing has changed and mail service will be still provided. I did created an account just few months ago with the intention to use it on few remaining sites where I was registered under local mail service that got filled with ads since takeover (which also bring 2FA but you have to use a dedicated app and nothing else works). Well, what a pity - another round for tuta, proton or seznam. They had this "rewards" system a'la dropbox where you could get additional space.
- superultra 3y agoI’m still miffed that Dropbox killed Mailbox. I’m a big fan of Notion but these hires/acquu-hires are a deathknell indicator. It means they’ve hit that point where the ideas have stopped flowing but the money hasn’t, so they start using the money instead of their own creative juices. It’s a shame because there’s still so many places Notion could improve.
- jitl 3y ago(I work at Notion) The way I see it, we have more ideas than we have people to work on them, but we have plenty of money in the bank. So, we buy a small company close to one of our idea so we can work on it now, instead of in 2-3 years time. I’m bummed we aren’t keeping Skiff’s mail product running though. Overall Notion has matured a bit more to a place we can make more investments in the future, especially on the engineering side. I’m finally working on a performance focused architecture project I’ve wanted to do since 2019 — that doesn’t feel like death knell to me.
- awill 3y agoso basically you bought a company where you didn't like the MAIN product. So this is just a quick way to hire a bunch of good engineers.
- b0afc375b5 3y agoSorry for the newb question, I have a custom domain and have set up MX records, etc., to point to skiff. Does anyone know how to switch these out to point to another provider, e.g., purelymail/fastmail/proton, without downtime? I mean I would not like to miss emails during the transfer. Is that even possible?
- Nyr 3y agoYou change the MX records to point to the new provider. No downtime. You also need to take care of SPF / DKIM / DMARC, but those records are for outbound mail.
- mike-cardwell 3y agoTheir product wasn't that great anyway - https://www.grepular.com/Skiff_Emails_Various_Privacy_Failures https://www.grepular.com/Skiff_Emails_Various_Privacy_Failur...
- NoboruWataya 3y agoWow, I was looking around for a cheap email provider lately for a secondary account and Skiff seemed to be the only one to offer everything I was looking for on their free plan. Almost seemed to good to be true - so I concluded it probably was and went with a more expensive but trusted option. Glad I did. I'm at the stage where for anything important I will be very reluctant to choose software that hasn't been around and well known for a long time. I can't recall the name of that idea that the longer something has survived, the longer it can be expected to survive in the future but it's definitely applicable to software.
- erisinger 3y agoLindy effect.
- ianopolous 3y agoIf you're interested in an open source, (including the server) self hostable, E2EE and federated/p2p storage, sharing and app protocol (including calendar, docs etc) who doesn't have VC investors, check out Peergos: https://peergos.org https://peergos.org Tech book - https://book.peergos.org https://book.peergos.org Source - https://github.com/peergos/peergos https://github.com/peergos/peergos Sign up to our server - https://peergos.net/?signup=true https://peergos.net/?signup=true
- jonwest 3y agoLove the idea of this, wish it had a Docker Container to make deployment easier.
- ianopolous 3y agoWe don't use docker ourselves, but there is a docker image: https://github.com/Peergos/web-ui/pkgs/container/web-ui/156152979?tag=v0.14.1 https://github.com/Peergos/web-ui/pkgs/container/web-ui/1561...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- joshuaissac 3y agoInteresting. Peergos seems to be a lot like a self-hosted Dropbox. How does it compare to ownCloud and Nextcloud?
- ianopolous 3y agoWe treat the server as an adversary. So everything is chunked an encrypted so the server can't see file data, filenames, file sizes, whether something is a file or dir, who has access to a file, who your friend are etc. Everything is signed so servers can't tamper with your data either. We also use a p2p and self-authenticated protocol so it is easy to migrate servers whilst keeping your identity, friends and data.
- monicaincog 3y agojust switch to https://snote.app https://snote.app it's privacy focused collaboration
- pluc 3y ago"joining" implements the merging of two things. When you toss one of those things out, it's called absorbing.
- Jaja_what_else 3y agoMailbox.org as a mail provider has not been metioned here, so i will do it now. That's it - i will not point out the features here as you can look it up yourself. Just the relevancy for this topic: berlin based company with a CEO that is highly skilled, involved in protocol standartization and very much into privacy topics and free software. i am also pretty much sure they will stay arou d for years to come, as they don't sell you into bs statements nobody can hold onto and are just rock solid business. fits my bill.. I do not like to do advertisement for anyone and really think calling out for some company is a no-go. Except one that has its product open source to full extend. But this does not apply here - its a central service you simply have to trust.. EMail is different. As you can, but shall but better not host that mess yourself. So that's the excuse for me doing advertisement here as a one-time exception..
- DavideNL 3y agoOne thing i hate about mailbox.org is the way they implemented 2fa login [1] They prepend a 4 digit PIN-code before the actual 2fa code - which of course is not compatible with password managers. It all feels so... clumsy. Other than that, it seems like a great service (i'm testing the trial version.) [1] https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/account-article/how-to-use-two-factor-authentication-2fa/ https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/account-article/how-to-use...
- Jaja_what_else 3y agoSome time ago they changed web login to have the username/account to be the full mail adress. That was a little more to type and only a small decrease of comfort. They had a reason for that and it was communicated. Anyway, I shiftet to use mail clients because of that. I am lazy af. Later i added also TOTP as 2fa and noticed also the unusual approach for the web login. I think first part is your password, followed by the 2fa generated code. keepassDX does that fine btw., as you just have to paste the totp code after your password, wich is also selectable with the magikeyboard. But since i already do not use weblogin nowadays except to check on my payments, this is not a showstopper for me. Otherwise i would also discourage the penalty on comfort here. I also see the clear advantage, as that they care about security seriously even when this may scare away some customers. Maybe they adapt to FIDO passkey soon or speak openly against it when they see some downside to securety. My usecase is not affected by this anyway as the one-time setup of a mailclient is the lazy way to have this solved.
- mvavassori 3y agoIs hard to beat a pay as you go email provider with no limits on the number of users and domains you can have -> purelymail.com It's the cheapest option i found, i pay less than 10 $ a year. It works perfectly on Thunderbird. With CalDAV and CardDAV support you have a standard protocol for your contacts and calendar; very portable.
- byyll 3y agoIf you are going to recommend other providers, at least mention what their funding is so they don't end up like Skiff.
- lopkeny12ko 3y agoI wonder how Notion/Skiff screwed up so royally with this acquisition. Almost 100% of the comments in this thread are related to the shutdown of the email service. This is, of course, the primary value of Skiff. How could anyone in the management chain possibly have signed off on an acquisition of all assets except the email provider?